LITERARY CRITICISM

City, Garden, and the Wild in Crime and Punishment

Wilderness and the constructed environment in Dostoevsky’s great novel.

Palace Square and Column of Alexander I, Saint Petersburg, Russia by Vyacheslav Argenberg. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license via Wikimedia Commons

The use of the wilderness as a symbol in literature reflects humanity’s complicated relationship with the natural environment. It can sometimes be a terrifying place where humanity’s greatest fears are realized. It is lovely, but also dark and deep. It can be a place where humanity must suffer without the benefits of civilization and progress, but it can also be a place of refuge, healing, and renewal.

References to nature and the natural environment are scarce in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This makes sense, because most of the novel takes place in the city of Petersburg, Russia, and one of the social problems the novel highlights is humanity’s collective abandonment of rural life in favor of the dubious benefits of urban life. The few references to nature and the natural environment in Crime and Punishment, including references to trees, flowers, forests and gardens, do not tend to present nature in a standard way as a source of comfort and healing, either within the city and beyond its boundaries. The novel’s main character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is able to enjoy an extended encounter with nature only after he has been incarcerated…